I've written on this blog about the Bloody Benders of southeast Kansas at least once before, maybe more than once, but I recently finished reading a new book about the Benders called Hell Comes to Play by Lee Ralph. It's very well researched and contains a lot of previously unknown information about the Benders, especially about their origins.
Anyway, reading the book got me to thinking again about the Benders. I believe I first wrote about the Benders in my book Ozarks Gunfights and Other Notorious Incidents, which was released in 2010. Looking back now at the Bender chapter in that book, I'm almost ashamed of it, because it contains some false information.
Specifically, in discussing the topic of what ultimately happened to the Benders, I suggested that it was likely they were overtaken and killed by posse members who went in pursuit of them following their heinous murders. I reached this conclusion based on the numerous stories to that effect that were told by supposed members of the posse in the years after the Bender killings. I kept reading stories, some of them deathbed confessions, from men who claimed to have been with the posse that overtook the Benders and dispatched them to hell south of the Kansas border in what was then Indian Territory. And I fell for the canard.
I guess everybody is entitled to a mistake now and then; mistakes find their way into print on a somewhat regular basis. But to someone who prides himself on being as accurate as possible, almost any mistake is a cause for embarrassment, and this one was especially embarrassing, because it's a fairly glaring error about a pretty important aspect of the Bender story. I corrected the error in my 2019 book entitled Murder and Mayhem in Southeast Kansas, but that doesn't erase the previous mistake, because the Gunfights book is still out there, too.
For the record, it is virtually certain that the Benders escaped unscathed after their heinous murders. Logic alone argues for this conclusion, since the murders were not discovered until a month after the Benders had flown the coop. By this time, they were long gone, not wandering around south of the Kansas border waiting to be overtaken by a vengeful posse. Very likely, they made their way back to Europe, where they had come from. Another reason the stories of the Benders being killed are almost certainly fabricated tales is that authorities who were in the best position to know the circumstances of the case dismissed the stories as falsehoods.
Speaking of where the Benders came from, I already knew, based on my research for Murder and Mayhem in SE KS, that the Benders came to Kansas from Illinois, that they had lived in France just prior to coming to America, and that they were originally from Germany. However, Mr. Ralph's book has added a lot of additional information about the family's origins that I did not previously know.
And speaking of lies that surround the story of the Benders, the idea that they were overtaken and killed by a posse is just one of many. It's not even the most outlandish.
For instance, the stories about Kate Bender being the leading spirit of the family and the stories about her and her older brother supposedly living together in an incestuous relationship, or else not being siblings at all, are sensationalist nonsense. Kate was only 13 or 14 years old when the Benders came to Kansas and was still just 16 when the last of the murders were committed. It's very unlikely a 16-year-old girl was the leading spirit of a family of cold-blooded killers. Kate was almost certainly the most fluent speaker of English in the family, which might have given people who had dealings with the Benders the idea that she was the leading spirit in the family, but just being able to communicate well with her neighbors doesn't make her the driving force behind a mass murder, as some of the more far-fetched stories about the Benders imply.
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